Each year at our annual fundraiser, the Literary Debutante Ball, we honor our authors who have published their debut books. This year, our debutantes are ‘Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots (W. W. Norton & Company), Puloma Ghosh, Mouth, (Astra House), Uche Okonkwo, A Kind of Madness, (Tin House Books), Shannon Sanders, Company, (Graywolf Press). Tickets are on […]Read More

Each year at our annual fundraiser, the Literary Debutante Ball, we honor our authors who have published their debut books. This year, our debutantes are ‘Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots (W. W. Norton & Company), Puloma Ghosh, Mouth, (Astra House), Uche Okonkwo, A Kind of Madness, (Tin House Books), Shannon Sanders, Company, (Graywolf Press). Tickets are on […]Read More

Reading Time: 2 minutes The train smells of old chips and coffee grounds. God, I could murder an Americano and a brownie bite. I spend far too much at Pret. Should eat more fruit, at least an apple once in a blue moon. * His hand on your waist as you dance, twirling you away, […]Read More

Sam feared old people. She feared their drooping folds, their soft edges, like a block of butter left out for too long. They haunted the office in their squelching orthopedic sneakers, moving so slowly that Sam sometimes expected them to leave behind snail trails of mucus. She drifted behind them in the hallways, keeping at […]Read More

Diane Oliver, © Peeler Studios Diane Oliver had published a handful of fiction pieces, one of which won an O. Henry Prize, had edited her college student newspaper, and was about to graduate from the Iowa Writers Workshop–one of the few Black women to have attended the program–when she was killed in a motorcycle accident […]Read More

We are thrilled to announce the winners of this year’s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize, judged by Kelly Link. We consider it our privilege to have spent time with so many terrific submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work. Congratulations to the winners! _____ First-Place Prize: “A Place Where Sadness Cannot Go” […]Read More

Illustration by Lore Mondragón My mother has been sending me letters lately. Not letters intended for me but rather letters she has been writing to various people in her life—important influences, she calls them. Relatives, friends, former classmates, coworkers. She has been writing two or three letters a week and sending them to me via […]Read More

Reading Time: 8 minutes Inhabiting the body can be a strange, unsettling thing, especially when it goes wrong. But how do we encapsulate this experience effectively in stories? The absurdist author George Saunders believes that ‘an aesthetic uncoupling from the actual’ may be necessary in fiction to ‘express our most profound experiences’ (cited in Lovell’s […]Read More

Reading Time: 4 minutes Something you cannot tell about violins, when you see one radiant in a museum cabinet or singing under the soloist’s touch, is that they are held together by pure tension. Many parts of the instrument are kept in place by nothing more than pressure and tightness. If there are too many […]Read More

MFA for ALL MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. MFA for All is not a degree-granting program—it is a community-rich online educational experience led by top-notch faculty, free of the significant hurdles […]Read More